strength training

In another lifetime, I taught strength and conditioning classes at Texas A&M and at Texas Woman’s Universities. A number of my books were geared to be textbooks for those classes as I wasn’t really happy with the books that were available. I bring this up because this blog is going to be about how textbooks approach a subject versus how coaches should be approaching it. The subject in question is the order of the exercises that our athletes perform. ...

The overload principle is a fundamental one to strength and conditioning. Basically this says that in order to keep the body adapting, we have to find a way to make the workouts more difficult. If we don’t find a way to continually make the workouts more difficult over time, then we will stop getting stronger, larger, faster, and more powerful. There’s a lot of ways that we can do this in strength and conditioning. We can increase the weight....

You have to practice running fast to get better at running fast. Variations of this statement are some of my favorite social media posts, it’s amazing how often people need to hear this. In this article I’m going to cover some of the more popular exercises that “replace” sprinting and talk about why I feel we have to keep them in perspective. First, a few things to keep in mind. Running fast is a skill. There are techniques, rhythms,...

Recently I had a post on social media about the importance of the squat for athletics. A friend that I really respect asked me about my thoughts on progressions for teaching the lift. I thought this would make a good post, but I’ll warn you in advance that I think we make this lift way too complicated. First off, if you work in a one-on-one situation then you have the luxury of time. You also have the need to...

Strength is an important ability for athletes. Strength is necessary for sprinting, agility, throwing, hitting, kicking, and jumping. It’s a frequent topic of mine with social media because a lot of people have been conditioned to think about according to the old periodization texts. In those texts, you spend the bulk of the year developing hypertrophy and gradually transitioning to maximal strength training. You may spend 4-8 weeks of the year with maximal strength training, then you focus on...